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Pentatonix Tears Up the Charts

Pentatonix fleetingly bumped Taylor Swift from atop iTunes with the album ‘That’s Christmas to Me.’ The a cappella group’s unlikely rise to stardom highlights the influence of YouTube as well as the power of a distinctive sound

You rarely hear them on the radio. Most fans can’t spell, let alone pronounce, their name. They don’t play gigs on Friday nights and their manager says they sometimes are mistaken for a death-metal group by fans who come across the cover art for some of their music collections. Instead of portraying the group’s five members, the covers feature five glowing bars and the mysterious letters: “PTX.”

Yet Pentatonix, a young a cappella group hailing mostly from Texas, may be one of the few acts to sell a million copies of a 2014...